How to get rid of spammers

Written by G.SMALL

What do spammers want from you? You have submitted your site to several ffa pages with intention of increasing traffic to your web site and you have invited a swarm of spammers to your email address. What can you do to avoid them from spamming you in future? All spammers need from you is your email they do not wish to come and visit your site to purchase anything which you sell at your site their intention is to sell you products or services, beating them is quite simple - just go to

How the War Against S^p^a^m is Killing the Internet

Written by Bill Platt

Hands down, email is most widely used and loved computer application brought to life by Internet.

According to publication 'Messaging Today' (2000 Electronic Mailbox Report - Feb. 21, 2001), "Email is most successful communications technology since television, and in a few years will even surpass that. There are currently more than 891 million email accounts in use Worldwide and 440 million in U.S. alone - with an average of more than 4 email accounts per person."

While more than 200 million of us use and enjoy email, there are a few thousand people abusing system and damaging communication potential of email for rest of us.

SP^AMMERS ARE THE ENEMY OF US ALL!

The most common forms of email abuse are as follows:

- Using email harves^ters (software which gathers email addresses from Internet for purpose of sending sp^am messages). - Selling addresses gathered from an actual opt-in email list to someone who recipient did not give contact permission to personally. - Buying Mil^lions CD's and then requiring people to opt-out of email, rather than to opt-in to email. - Providing remove addresses that do not work.

Generally, persons using these sp^am techniques are morons who are simply too lazy to learn how to develop an honest online business or too impatient to build a business that will last a lifetime. Let us not forget that "moron" is key word here since a sp^ammers business will not generate enough income to justify cost of doing business outlaw way.

LAZY LIVES ON BOTH SIDES OF THE STREET!

Sp^ammers sp^am because they are too lazy to build an online business old-fashioned way --- with honesty and integrity.

As a result of sp^ammers obnoxious laziness, public has been confronted with growing nuisance of hundreds of sp^am messages in their email boxes on a daily basis! I have filtered more than 100 pieces per day to my trash bin, and I still receive another 200 plus messages per day that I have not set up filters for yet.

While I will admit that sp^ammers are truly annoying, I must confess that general public has created new problems for all of us! In war against sp^am, email account holders constantly suggest that their ISP's must deal with sp^am issue for them.

ISP'S RESPOND

By putting responsibility of controlling sp^am on shoulders of ISP's, rather than hitting delete key ourselves, we have opened a whole new can of worms.

In truth, ISP's cannot do too much to stem tide of sp^am. Yet, with so many angry customers, ISP's felt a strong need to find some kind of solution to problem.

Neither is a perfect solution to sp^am problem... In fact, both are actually very poor solutions to sp^am problem!

HOW SP^AM FILTERS WORK

To understand quandary created by use of filters in war against sp^am, we must first understand how sp^am filters work.

It is important to understand that filters are actually software applications.

Software is not intuitive!

While a few software applications may seem intuitive, illusion exists only because mind of programmer was able to foresee your desires for use of software.

Filtering software exists only as a set of rules to determine likelihood of a message being sp^am. Here is an outline of some of basic rules that sp^am filtering software follows:

1. If origination email server is different from email server of sender's default email address, then it is likely sp^am. 2. If email is delivered to more than 25 people, it is likely sp^am. 3. If email originates from a specific server, then it is likely sp^am. (This is only rule that RBL follows.) 4. If email originates from a specific country TLD (top-level domain), then it is likely sp^am. 5. If certain words appear in Subject or Email Body, then it is likely sp^am. (This is where real problems begin!)

THE PANDORA'S BOX OF THE SP^AM WARS

ISP's who choose filter option will either install a filter on incoming email only, outgoing email only or a combination of both.

With fifth basic rule in sp^am filtering software that most ISP's use, each ISP has a list of "sp^am words" that software scans for.

The first time I had experienced ugly filter problem was with my first ezine. My ezine was a computer support publication and upon introduction of a major v^irus, I tried to send instructions to my list on how to identify v^irus and to repair its damage. Unfortunately, my list server had blocked all messages that mentioned name of virus. (Never mind that actual payload email never mentioned given name for v^irus!)

My second experience was in trying to send an article to a friend because I felt content of article was important for my friend to have. After seven attempts, I finally realized what blocked "sp^am word" was. If you can believe it, blocked word was Ama^zon.com !!!